1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to a fibre channel forwarder fabric login sequence in a fibre channel switch environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Data storage systems, or disk storage systems, are utilized to process and store data. A storage system may include one or more disk drives. These data processing systems typically require a large amount of data storage. Customer data, or data generated by users within the data processing system, occupies a great portion of this data storage. Many of these computer systems include virtual storage components.
Various components in computer systems, such as storage components, may be connected together using a fibre channel protocol, a gigabit speed data transfer technology used in a variety of settings including storage systems. When two fibrechannel ports are connected to each other via a fibre channel cable, a link initialization process must complete before the two ports can exchange meaningful data. Part of this link initialization process involves determining the speed at which the link will operate. In most cases, the fibre channel ports can support multiple speeds (e.g., 1 Gb/sec, 2 Gb/sec, 4 Gb/sec) and are normally configured to execute a standard speed negotiation algorithm in order to determine, and thereby operate at, the highest common speed supported by each port. This negotiation algorithm is part of the overall fibre channel standards set by the T11 Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).